


The Lioness and the Unicorn

by ishafel



Category: Lymond Chronicles - Dunnett
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-12
Updated: 2010-05-12
Packaged: 2017-10-09 10:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/86216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is the people we love who make us who we are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lioness and the Unicorn

She was Lymond's first love, and his first mistake: the first woman to capture him, the first to attempt to destroy him. She was beautiful, and cruel, and many years his senior: the king's sister and Lennox's wife, a huntress by nature and by choice. She reminded him of his mother and she was nothing like any woman he'd ever met. She was his equal and more than that she was his teacher.

It was an education more dangerous and far more comprehensive than the one he had had at the finest university in Europe, or at the hands of his mother and the man he thought was his father. From university he had learned mathematics and the works of the ancients; from his mother he had learned music and poetry and chivalry, and from Gavin Crawford fear and swordsmanship and all the manly arts. Margaret Lennox taught him love, and suffering: the exquisite beauty and agony of words, and teeth, and claws.

Sometimes she was kind to him. Her hands were soft, gentle--always they were pleasing, as they mapped the geography of his body. Her mouth was hungry on his, but tender, and afterward she lay with her tawny hair tangled on the pillow and the sheet half-covering her lush white breasts, and slept beside him trusting as a child. Lymond was, in turns, grateful and awed at her bounty, and sick at his own perfidy, that he would dare to lie beside another man's wife and lead her so to sin and damnation. He was very young.

And sometimes, of course, she was not kind at all. She was often angry, at him, at her lord husband, at her brother the king of England. They betrayed her, one and all; most of all her own body betrayed her. For all her sensuality, all her joy in her own beauty, she would far rather have been born a man, than be dependent on the men who failed her. She was not often happy, Margaret Lennox, and it was evident in the lines around her mouth, the sharpness of her smile, the cat's gleaming golden eyes through which she watched the world.

Lymond came to her a boy, fragile and fey and already half broken. She made of him a man, cast in her own mold, feral and angry and ruthless. It was the worst thing she could think of to do to him, short of destroying him outright. In the end it was enough to damn him, and after that it was enough to save him. His mother had taught him compromise, and her husband had taught him surrender; from Margaret Lennox, who had lost two thrones, he learned victory.


End file.
